Summer Reading: How to Shake Up the Status Quo

When you write a weekly column that examines creative responses to social problems, you begin to spot patterns. One of the things I’ve noticed is that, unlike the bursts of creativity that are depicted in children’s books or Hollywood movies, social innovation rarely comes from “eureka” moments; it’s much more deliberate. It’s something that can be studied and learned.

And since we’re in the midst of summer, what better time to compile a short reading list for anyone interested in shaking up the status quo. To be sensitive to the exigencies of beach reading, I’m including only four books, the thickest of which is 266 pages (excluding footnotes). They are not new books; in fact, my copies are dog-eared, with highlights and scribbled notes throughout.

“Innovation and Entrepreneurship” by Peter F. Drucker
Peter Drucker, a management expert, was decades ahead of his peers in identifying the role of entrepreneurs in addressing social problems. His books are packed with an astonishingly rich collection of insights, and they are not just for business people. “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” is a road map for anyone who wants to learn to think like an innovator in any field.

Drucker identifies seven key sources of innovative opportunity, including such things as changes in demographics, perceptions and meaning, as well as industry structures. But the most important, he notes, are unexpected successes, which can reveal new possibilities and discrepancies between reality as it is assumed to be and reality as it is, in fact.

Unexpected successes are all around us. One example we have covered in Fixes is the success of the 100,000 Homes campaign, which, over the past four years, has led cities to find supportive housing for nearly 57,000 people who were chronically homeless. The campaign has shown that our housing systems are capable of helping more people more rapidly than had previously been imagined.

“Mindfulness” by Ellen J. Langer
Is it possible to adjust a few words in a sentence and shift a person’s creative output? Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University who has conducted an array of inventive experiments over three decades, has shown that the answer is yes; the key is to provide people with cues to help them enter into a mindful state, she writes. There are many ways to do this.

Langer uses the term mindfulness, which is commonly associated with meditation, to describe a state of being in which one becomes oriented in the present, open to new information, sensitive to context, aware of different perspectives and untrapped by old categories.

How do you help people enter this state? One way is to help people reject absolute categories in favor of open-ended frames. For example, in one experiment, Langer and her colleagues introduced a set of objects to two groups of subjects using slightly different words. For one group, they referred to standard categories: “This is a dog’s chew toy.” For another, they shifted to a “conditional” frame: “This could be a dog’s chew toy.”

During the experiment, the researchers asked subjects to fill out forms in pencil, but they intentionally made errors in their instructions. The question was, would the subjects think to use the dog’s chew toy – a piece of rubber — as an eraser? As it turned out, some did — but only subjects who had been “introduced to the toy conditionally,” observed Langer. Framing questions and instructions conditionally — or prompting people to be in the present in other ways — consistently leads to more creativity: musicians play with more energy and nuance; camp counselors provide better feedback to children; children think more critically in school.

Why is this important? Because mindlessness is a curse that runs through society. Indeed, many of our columns report on people who are trying to change systems that have become rigid and out of touch, like our systems for foster care, music education and scientific research. We experience mindlessness every day, from tiny offenses to unconscionable oversights. It may be an ice cream vendor automatically telling a 5-year-old she can have only one flavor in her child-size serving, or a doctor discharging a Medicare patient without checking that she knows how to take her medication properly. The question is how to get people to notice new things and remain alive to context. Langer shows how to cultivate these mental habits.

“Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics” by Jane Jacobs
Why are businesses so much more inventive than governments? But why do businesses often cause harm when they are used to run prisons or homes for the disabled? Why do nonprofits often fail when they try to run businesses?

Jane Jacobs is famous for her classic, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” In “Systems of Survival,” she asserts that our ethical frameworks have grown out of the fact that there are two ways that human beings ensure their survival: taking and trading. “Because we possess these two radically different ways of dealing with our needs, we also have two radically different systems of morals and values — both systems valid and necessary,” writes Jacobs.

Jacobs labels these systems “commercial” and “guardian” moral syndromes — the former historically associated with commerce, the latter with the military and government.

By contrast, in the “guardian” syndrome she finds a parallel set of values like: “exert prowess,” “be obedient and disciplined,” “adhere to tradition,” “deceive for the sake of the task,” “be ostentatious,” “be fatalistic.”

Once you discover these values systems, you begin to recognize how they play out in society every day: how they shape behaviors in institutions that evolved out of different traditions – and how, when unexamined, they can perpetuate social problems.

Jacobs’s analysis explains, for example, why church and military officials – historically guardian structures – conceal internal abuses or why governments distort science when they dictate where and how it should be financed. Most useful, her analysis helps explain whether institutions that blend value sets —like nonprofits or certain government departments — will encounter cultural obstacles or discover unforeseen opportunities.

“Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society” by John W. Gardner
Why do once vibrant institutions become calcified as they mature? Why do they lose their creative edge as they become more efficient? “A society decays when its institutions and individuals lose their vitality,” writes Gardner, who was the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and one of the pre-eminent social innovators of his generation.

In this powerful book, published 50 years ago, he outlines what societies must do to renew their institutions on a continuing basis. It begins by helping individuals renew themselves: helping them to develop the self-knowledge and spiritedness needed to “to assault the complacency and rigidity of the status quo.” He outlines qualities of mind that are needed for this task: versatility and adaptability, the ability to tolerate ambiguity, the willingness to fail – qualities that sync closely with Langer’s description of mindfulness.

“Instead of giving young people the impression that their task is to stand a dreary watch over the ancient values,” writes Gardner, “we should be telling them the grim but bracing truth that it is their task to re-create those values continuously in their own behavior, facing the dilemmas and catastrophes of their own time.”

“[S]ociety,” he adds, “is not like a machine that is created at some point in time and then maintained with a minimum of effort; a society is being continuously re-created, for good or ill, by its members. This will strike some as a burdensome responsibility, but it will summon other to greatness.”